I am pleased to announce the release of new versions of EditTools. Version 5.9 for users who use Word 2003 and version 6 for users of Word 2007 and newer. (Note: Versions 5.9 and 6 are identical except that 6 uses the Ribbon feature of Word. However, version 5.9 will be the last version of EditTools for Word 2003; all future releases of EditTools will require Word 2007 or newer.)

Additional tweaks and additions have been made, increasing the power of EditTools.

Especially helpful to me in recent weeks have been the Remove & Reinstate Formats macros, the Style Inserter macro, and the Multifile Find macro. I have been working on a project that requires me to apply a client template to the files I have been given for editing and then styling the elements of the document by applying the appropriate Style from the template. Applying the Style is quick and easy once I set up Style Inserter, but the problem was getting the file ready for the Styles. The files came loaded with author-applied formatting; I needed to set the document to Normal without losing any of the bold, italic, bold-italic, or small cap formatting that the author applied. All other author-applied formatting had to go.

This is where Remove Formats came to the rescue. The macro lets me temporarily remove the formatting that I want to preserve. Once I ran the macro, I could select the whole document (Ctrl+A) and use Word’s Clear Formats command to strip out all author-applied formatting and set everything to Normal. Then I ran the Reinstate Formats macro and all of the formatting that I wanted preserved — the bold, the italic, the bold-italic, and the small caps — were reinstated. Now I could use Style Inserter to quickly style the document. What previously took a considerable amount of time to accomplish, now was done in minutes.

While editing, I realized that a decision I had made in earlier chapters was wrong and needed correction. Multifile Find came to my rescue. The macro gives me a choice: I can generate a report that tells me where the item I am looking for can be found — that is, in which documents and on what pages and the number of times on each page — or it can take me to each instance and let me decide whether to correct the shown instance or not. Using Multifile Find let me easily find and correct the erroneous material. No need to individually open each file and do a manual Find and Replace using Word’s features; instead, I let the macro do the work.

As I have written many times, time is money. The faster I can accomplish a task, the more money I can make. However, I cannot let speed be my master and sacrifice quality for speed. The idea behind EditTools and other macros is to make important but “rote” tasks go quickly so more time can be spent on editing. The enhancements in version 6 of EditTools do just that.